Tag Archives: politics

We’re gonna have to choose between having human rights, or having no political power. It’s gonna be a difficult one, but I’m gonna go with human rights

Let me expand that for you, because it’s really the option between;

Having human rights, political self-determination, a currency that isn’t linked to Conservative austerity, freedom to pursue left-wing political causes, and the ability to decide our country’s fate.

And having no political power, having our most populous city be England’s meat-shield for nuclear weapons and disasters, and our people continually denigrated by the ruling government and popular media of what is ostensibly ‘our’ overall shared nation.

The idea of Scotland even having a voice was actually used as a scare tactic by the Tories in the General Election. They used the bogeyman of a Labour and Scottish National Party coalition as something that was automatically going to be a bad thing. Labour, for their part, immediately doubled-down and stated that in no way were they ever going to work with the SNP, and look where we are now.

It’s not just the educational system. It’s that the Left hasn’t been able to provide a viable outlet for the working class people who put their faith in Trump – that’s our fight, to help organize the Left so that it becomes possible. “Fix education” is the liberal answer to pretty much everything, but it won’t remedy the wealth inequality and it won’t remedy the alienation. There needs to be a coherent anti-capitalist movement that focuses on putting power and influence into the hands of the working class beyond the vague promises about education that have been touted for decades, and that means full worker control.

The liberal insistence that the only thing stopping people from being more liberal is a supposed lack of education is sickening in of itself.

See if only the working class wasn’t so STUPID they’d know that they should only be politely racist

Like, fixing the education system is really important, but it’s a symptom, not a cause. Housing discrimination isn’t caused by poor education, poor education is caused by housing discrimination. The education system as is serves not to cause problems, but to help perpetuate and justify as acceptable problems that already exist.

This scales up, too. Liberals don’t just treat poor conservatives as idiots, but also treat the elected politicians as idiots, instead of calculating, savvy people with a good sense of how to play with the media. If you treat conservatives as inconsistent in their beliefs, and as fools that ‘somehow’ bumbled into the job, then you’ll never understand their actions and you’ll never be able to combat the conservative ‘wing’ of liberalism.

Neoliberalism is a widely used term today. However, it is often unclear what people refer to when they use it. In its most systematic usage it might refer to a theory, a set of ideas, a political strategy, or a historical period. Could you begin by explaining how you understand neoliberalism?

I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labor.

In many respects the project was a counterrevolutionary project. It would nip in the bud what, at that time, were revolutionary movements in much of the developing world — Mozambique, Angola, China etc. — but also a rising tide of communist influences in countries like Italy and France and, to a lesser degree, the threat of a revival of that in Spain.

Even in the United States, trade unions had produced a Democratic Congress that was quite radical in its intent. In the early 1970s they, along with other social movements, forced a slew of reforms and reformist initiatives which were anti-corporate: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, consumer protections, and a whole set of things around empowering labor even more than it had been empowered before.

So in that situation there was, in effect, a global threat to the power of the corporate capitalist class and therefore the question was, “What to do?”. The ruling class wasn’t omniscient but they recognized that there were a number of fronts on which they had to struggle: the ideological front, the political front, and above all they had to struggle to curb the power of labor by whatever means possible. Out of this there emerged a political project which I would call neoliberalism.

HERE IS HOW

AND DO NOT FORGET, MINDS CAN CHANGE OVER TIME. If every vote for the last 15 years was progressive, but in 1994 you find out that your candidate voted against a minimum-wage increase, consider all the evidence. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Have they voted for increases since then? Spoken about income inequality? Politicians are also people (well–most of them, I still think Malevolent Tangerine is a scientific experiment gone horribly wronger), and they can learn and grow too.

I’m still baffled by both people who use incidents like this to soap box for their anti-gun rights politics or their pro-gun control politics.

I don’t know how people can look at these repeated mass shootings committed by white men and think it all somehow boils down to guns. Having guns in church wouldn’t have saved people and that shooter having a slightly harder time getting his hands on a gun wouldn’t have either. Those are both bandaid solutions to a much bigger problem: white men feel fundamentally entitled to the lives of other people and will take them however they can.

I sometimes fear that people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress worn by grotesques and monsters as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis. Fascism arrives as your friend. It will restore your honour, make you feel proud, protect your house, give you a job, clean up the neighbourhood, remind you of how great you once were, clear out the venal and the corrupt, remove anything you feel is unlike you…It doesn’t walk in saying, “Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”

2) identification of an Other who can be blamed and removed so that the problem is solved and the future is prosperous and safe. (The Other almost never caused the problem, but that’s not the point; the point is how you can tell the story to link them together.) The idea of the Other being to blame is often softened, at first: “Well, we’re not talking about ALL [group], just the bad ones!” Just punishments for the “bad” people, and you and your friends and family get your future back.

It’s a deal an awful lot of people will take, if they are brought to believe in it.